There is a new cottage industry of low-budget horror movies about awkward people and their secret insatiable appetites. The French horror film Raw is about a young woman who slowly discovers she is a cannibal. Butt Boy is about a man whose posterior can swallow people whole – yes, literally – while Bloodthirsty explores a vegan pop star who is a secret werewolf. The Carnivores continues in that tradition, although it more of a relationship drama than a genre film. It is provocative and strange, hallmarks of the genre, so its major shortcoming is the absence of any emotional connection. It is difficult to care about a couple when both parties are deeply unpleasant.
Alice (Tallie Mendel) and Bret (Lindsay Burdge) are a couple with a modest life in Austin. They work as a customer service representative and postal worker, respectively, and a lack of intimacy has unusual consequences for both of them. Bret fixates on her dog, while Alice has a subconscious obsession with meat (she sleepwalks to the beef section of the grocery store). The dog is a particular sore spot: he’s sick and the medical bills are adding up, so in an act of desperation, Alice abandons the dog without telling Bret. This leads to a protracted fallout – Bret becomes more erratic and paranoid – while Alice’s meat-based fantasies are much more vivid.
Director Caleb Michael Johnson, who co-wrote the script with Jeff Bay Smith, keeps the production values gritty and realistic. Every location has a lived-in quality, suggesting this is outsider art with more freedom than interference. In fact, The Carnivores has more in common with the mumble-core movement of the early aughts than modern horror. There are weird little details, like Alice’s notebook where she tracks her bedtime habits, that genuinely add authenticity. Many of these details, unfortunately, are incredibly tedious. Vincent James Pendergrast plays Alice’s hapless co-worker, for example, and he serves no narrative purpose except to be annoying. The only real hope for connection to the material is the relationship between Alice and Bret, and they are so tiresome there is no way to care about what happens to them. They’re a textbook example of Roger Ebert’s “idiot plot,” wherein the entire film could be solved if they just had a conversation.
For a film that is ostensibly about the need for communication and physical intimacy, it’s a problem when you spend most of the film rooting for the central couple to break up. Through no fault of the performers, these are deeply unlikable people: obsessive, self-absorbed, and joyless. That is even more pronounced when they are together, since they make each other miserable in ways the other cannot really fathom. Some horror-adjacent sequences keep the material interesting, like a shot of Alice putting a slice of meat on Bret’s leg before she licks it. Other, better films have explored the connection between horror and desire, although they had the wherewithal to be more titillating or include more material that engages our imaginations. The Carnivores ends with a shot of the lost dog, who decides to abandon Alice and Bret instead of entering their own home again. He has the right idea.
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